The Portable World Bible presents the fundamental tenets of the world's basic source religions. Contemporary readers are offered, in concise, authoritative translations, the religious thought of the ages, selected, interpreted, and arranged in view of modern man's quest for ultimate truths and values. Robert O. Ballou, the volume's editor, has omitted mere stories, history, and ceremonial detail; what remains in every case is the essence of religion, set down with a clarity and simplicity never before achieved. The Portable World Bible is an unparalleled work of poetic and...

The Portable Blake contains the hermetic genius's most important works: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in their entirety; selections from his "prophetic books" including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Abion, America, The Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas and from other works of poetry and prose, as well as the complete drawings for The Book of Job."

It is commonplace to say that our civilization is built on the ruins of Greece. W. H. Auden's splendid anthology locates the truth behind the truism, while filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a people who gave us so much of our cultural legacy.

Every page in The Portable Greek Reader contains some fundamental precursor of the ways in which we think about heroism, destiny, love, politics, tragedy, science, virtue, and thought itself, Included are excerpts from the mythologies of Hesiod; the martial epics of Homer; the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the philosophy...

Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the...

The Portable Milton is an authoritative grand tour through the imagination of this prodigal genius. In the course of his forty-year career, John Milton evolved from a prodigy to a blind prophet, from a philosophical aesthete to a Puritan rebel, and from a poet who proclaimed the triumph of reason to one obsessed with the intractability of sin. Throughout these transformations, he conceived his work as a form of prayer, written in the service of the supreme being.

This volume, edited and with a superb introduction by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image--and miraculously succeeding.

The Romans conquered most of the known world and detailed their conquests in calm, unapologetic histories. They were a supremely urbane people who longed poetically for the farming life. Valuing toughness and practicality in all things, they turned the love poem into a cynical rebuke and wrote tragedies in which the unfathomable actions of gods gave way to the staggering cruelties of man. As the empire slid into decay, Tacitus pulled back the curtain on the perverse intrigues of the emperors, and a Roman-educated Christian named Augustine recounted his spiritual awakening in what may be the...

A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871 1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook the low life of New York s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized...

Includes A Summary View of the Rights of British America and Notes on the State of Virginia complete; seventy-nine letters; "Response to the Citizens of Albemarle," 1790; "Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank," 1791; and many other writings.

In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, who served three kings as a customs official and special envoy, virtually invented English poetry. He did so by wedding the language of common speech to metrical verse, creating a medium that could accommodate tales of courtly romance, bawdy fabliaux, astute psychological portraiture, dramatic monologues, moral allegories, and its author's astonishing learning in fields from philosophy to medicine and astrology. Chaucer's accomplishment is unequalled by any poet before Shakespeare and--in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and...